Ecocritical Approaches to Literature in French by Douglas L. Boudreau and Marnie M. Sullivan (review)

This collection of papers is the result of a two-session panel organized at the forty-third Ne/MLA convention in 2012. In their introduction, Douglas L. Boudreau and Marnie M. Sullivan state their intentions to introduce professors of French literature to ecocritical approaches, to turn ecocriticism away from its usual orientation towards literature written in English, and to promote the inclusion of other "visions and voices" in ecocriticism's field of inquiry, namely those conveyed in the French language. With this work, the two editors transfer the theoretical bulk of ecocriticism developed from the 1990s from literature in English to that written in French. According to Boudreau and Sullivan, since language is not a neutral medium through which thought is expressed, but rather influences how and what we think, literature in French will certainly dispense different insights and perspectives from literature in English. The ecocritical standpoint envisioned by the editors and adopted by the contributors to this collection does not limit its focus to the representation of nature ("the writing of nature"); they carry out their investigation following two interconnected axes: culture and language. The first core idea underpinning the ecocritical endeavor of this book is that culture, language, and the literary imaginary exert an important influence on environmental thought, and, reciprocally, that environmental conditions modify the writing and the idea of nature that literary writers and readers may have. Thus, first and foremost, ecocriticism questions the interaction between physical environments and literary production, how the first inflects the latter, and, on the other side, how literary representation modifies our understanding of the environment in which we live.

The variety of literary traditions studied in these eight papers, which embraces African, Canadian (Acadian), French, and Caribbean texts, and the different ecocritical declinations the authors utilize in their essays exemplify the extent to which ecocriticism has broadened its field of research in the last twenty years. What Boudreau and Sullivan want to provide to their readers is not a methodology of linguistic or textual analysis, but rather a set of examples all sharing a critical vantage point from which it is possible to examine various aspects of culture related to social and natural environments, as well as to the texts from which they emerge. This is why ecocritical scholars tend to enrich their researches by adding theoretical frameworks associated with other areas of inquiry, so that their criticism acquires ecopoetic, geocritical, and feminist dimensions. As the editors claim, "interdisciplinarity has been lauded as one of the chief strengths of ecocriticism" (4). And this is the reason that eco-criticism pairs so successfully with the disruptive and subversive potential of postcolonial studies in all eight papers. The educational, pedagogical side of ecocriticism is explicitly stated and encouraged against a tradition of French literary studies that had mostly focused on textual analysis and often seemed self-referential, that is, not related to students' life outside the classroom.

In this respect, two papers stand out for their outspoken pedagogical and didactic intents: Roland Racevskis's "French Ecological Fiction in the Classroom," and Marnie M. Sullivan's "Ecocritical Pedagogy for Teaching Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre and Le Chant écarlate." The former underlines the social role that literature courses may play in contemporary academia: Racevskis calls for teaching literature and philosophy in French by adopting the "principle of relevance" instead of the "principle of elegance," that is to say, by relating literary texts to issues that are relevant to students' life, such as the ecological sustainability of their campuses. In so doing, through the lens of ecocriticism, literature and philosophy in French can "inspire [students] to continue both their study and their own consciousness-raising beyond the classroom" (35).

Although the approach of Sullivan's paper is linked to environmental preoccupations too, by giving an example of how Bâ's works can be taught ecocritically it expands the area of action of ecocriticism to question some ethical and...